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For Intuit, three divestitures were better together

Preparing three divisions for sale simultaneously was a unique experience in separating the company’s underlying product technology.

In August 2015, Intuit announced its plan to divest three parts of its business—Quicken, QuickBase, and Demandforce—to focus on its core businesses. Divestitures can be challenging, but even more so considering Intuit’s goal to tackle all three divestitures at the same time. To separate successfully, Intuit would need to understand the scope of its deep-seated product technology connections, carefully plan the separation effort, and set up an appropriate governance structure to ensure alignment across all the divisions.

PwC's solution

In recent years, Intuit and PwC developed an M&A integration playbook for the product, IT, and workplace resource organizations. That playbook became the foundation for a structured product technology-focused program office. The team focused on tasks such as, developing transition services, enabling engineering access to Intuit’s software development tools, separating shared data, ID management and licenses in the company tech stack, crafting cybersecurity and data center transition strategies. The team helped Intuit develop Day One and long-term separation plans for its product and technology teams while managing issues, risks, and dependencies across the 15 engineering workstreams.

Impact on client’s business

Despite the inherent challenges, Intuit was able to divest all three divisions to three separate buyers within eight months, resulting in ~$500 million in proceeds. PwC worked with company leaders to address technology issues during the transaction negotiations and remained by their side during the post-close transitions to advise on technology related sticking points and the cost and scope of Transaction Service Agreements (TSAs). In one case, we successfully helped Intuit reduce a three-year data center TSA down to 18 months, saving Intuit money and helping it move forward faster with the divestiture.

"Overall, the deals represented a significant business success for Intuit, letting the company tighten its focus on its core business while giving the target businesses the chance to thrive under new ownership.”